Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Concentrating on painting but with reference to other media, we examine art between the beginning of Modern Times around 1400 until the present. It is team taught and organized around specific topics each occupying one week. It is organized chronologically but does not attempt to be a comprehensive survey, but rather to highlight important issues, debates, innovations, specific works or artists.

Examines major works of world architecture and the unique aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues that frame them. Faculty members will each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise, drawing from various periods and such diverse cultures as modern and contemporary Europe and America, early modern Japan, Mughal India, Renaissance and medieval Europe, and ancient Rome. Sections will develop thematically and focus on significant issues in the analysis and interpretation of architecture.

A survey of the diverse architectural traditions of the Japanese archipelago from the prehistoric era through the twentieth century. Various building types-including the Shinto shrine, Buddhist temple, castle, teahouse, palace and farmhouse-will be studied through representative surviving examples. Issues to be explored include the basic principles of timber-frame engineering, the artisanal culture of master carpenters, and the mixed legacy of the functionalist interpretation of Japanese architecture.

Surveys the arts of Japan from the prehistoric period to the nineteenth century. Includes Japanese painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as calligraphy, garden design, ceramics, and prints. Essential themes include the relationship between artistic production and Japanese sociopolitical development, Sino-Japanese cultural exchange, and the impact of religion, region, gender, and class on Japanese artistic practice.

This course provides an introduction to Japanese art and cultural history through a survey of the Japanese woodblock print from its emergence in the mid-17th century to the modern era. Technical developments, major genres, and master designers are explored within the context of Japan's pictorial traditions and evolving urban culture. Topics for consideration include aesthetic discourse, censorship, erotica, Japonisme, the construction of social identity, print culture, and the representation of war.

This is an introduction to the arts of South and Southeast Asia from the second millennium BCE to the present. Each lecture will examine selective artifacts and sites to understand the history of major artistic traditions developed in response to cultural exchanges and political dynamics within and beyond the region. By examining a wide range of material, such as Buddhist sculptures, Hindu temples, Jain manuscript paintings, Islamic tombs, calendar art, and so on, with fundamental art historical questions, we will consider what makes the arts of South and Southeast Asia unique as well as universal in the twenty-first century context.

This course is structured as a dialogue between the historical and theoretical frameworks that have shaped the formulation of architectural principles - what the architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower called the "apparatus of forms" - by means of selected case studies. The organizing principle here is thematic as opposed to chronological, and synoptic rather than merely factual. We treat a selected range of concepts developed by philosophers and historians to explain the Classical and the Baroque as dialectical systems of thought that arise in history but transcend this history to mark modern and postmodern practices.

Charts the rise and dissemination of a classical architectural vocabulary in Renaissance Europe and its colonial empire. Lectures focus on the development of the style, its origin in the fascination with antiquity, its response to shifts in social and political life, its mechanisms of transmission (travel, book and print culture, objects) as well as phenomena of exchange, export, and resistance to this pan-European trend in the Mediterranean, Latin America and Asia.

Art of the seventeenth century in Europe, including genial works by Caravaggio (and his followers), Annibale Carracci, Bernini, Cortona, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Ribera, Velazquez, Rubens, Van Dyck, Le Brun, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, as well as the global diffusion of the Baroque Style.

This course introduces basic architectural concepts and techniques used to address issues of form, function, ornament and material. This course provides instruction in project analysis, visualization, communication, and fabrication using both physical and digital modeling. Students proceed through a series of progressively complex investigations of transformational processes, context, program and material assemblage. As an introduction to architectural design, we will explore comprehensive and foundational design principles, skill sets and critical thinking and making. The course material will be presented through a series of presentations, exercises, workshops, reviews and discussions. This course fosters the development of a design methodology founded on thoughtful, creative and rigorous work practices in service of exploring meaningful expressions of the constructed environment.

Over half the world's inhabitants live in urban environments. Understanding, engaging, and re-imaging the urban condition, with all its complexities, structures, processes, and idiosyncrasies has become a pressing issue for architects, landscape architects, and urban designers alike. This studio will focus on the urban condition as a byproduct of the connections between both human and nonhuman frameworks (systems + environments). Using diagramming and mapping processes, both iteratively and speculatively, students will investigate system-environment relationships through the examination of qualities, behaviors, and territories for a select set of urban agents. Each investigation will reveal latent, suppressed, emerging, provisional, and otherwise unmapped connections, which influence the formation of urban spaces, infrastructures, and technologies. Course material is presented through a series of exercises, lectures, workshops, and reviews, which introduce students to the application of foundational design principles and critical design strategies. This course fosters the development of a design methodology founded on thoughtful, creative, ethical and sustainable practices, and explores meaningful expressions for the built environment.

Group tutorial, offers concentrators the choice of several study groups investigating a particular field of art or architectural history.

Tutorial consisting of weekly meetings with designated faculty, where regular reading and writing assignments are focused on a topic of mutual interest.

An introduction to the methods and research skills of art and architectural history.

In the fall term, HAA 99 includes several group tutorial meetings with the senior honors adviser, where assignments are aimed at facilitating the writing of a senior honors thesis; spring term consists of independent writing, under the direction of the individual thesis adviser.

This course introduces sophomore concentrators to on-site study of art and architecture through the case study of a particular geographic and cultural area. This year: Sicily.

Critical examination of the arts of the book, portable arts, and architecture sponsored by the Timurids (1370-1507), a dynasty founded by Timur (Tamerlane). Emphasis will also be given to primary written sources in translation.

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, three empires - the Mediterranean-based Ottomans, Safavids in Iran, and Mughals in India - developed interconnected yet distinctive architectural cultures with individualized ornamental idioms by fusing their common Timurid heritage with cosmopolitan regional traditions. Explores connections between empire building and architecture, with respect to aesthetics, religion, imperial ideology, and theories of dynastic legitimacy.

In 1960 the Harvard Art Museums acquired an album composed of sketches, designs, and finished drawings (no. 1960.161). The 57 album folios preserve these valuable resources, with the artworks arranged singly or in groups on each page. The corpus constitutes the materia technica used by artists to make objects in different media, principally lacquered pen boxes and mirror cases, which were purchased from the bazaar by members of Qajar society and Europeans who visited Iran between the early 1800s and 1900s. The album has not yet been the subject of close study, despite the fact that it is the richest resource of its kind known today. The goal of the seminar is to examine the album and its contents from different perspectives, the period in which it was made, to prepare for the album's exhibition and publication as a monograph in 2017.

A problem oriented inquiry into the art and architecture (ca. 750 to 1300) of the Arab lands, focusing on regions circling the Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula to Iraq. Materials (art of book, portable arts, epigraphy, architecture) and geographic focus vary. Themes also change, but include relations between art and literature, aesthetics, vision and perception, courtly culture, mercantile patronage, cultural continuities and resurgences. Al-Andalus and the Maghrib are the focus in 2012.

The banquet is the key event of Roman elite society. It involved not only luxurious and well-staged food and wine, but proper behavior, a decent setting, luxury furniture, entertainment and enchantment. The seminar discusses visual, archaeological and literary evidence to explore the sensual culture of the Roman dinner party - oscillating between strict social rules, intellectual table talks, the theatrical orchestration of high cuisine, revelry, eroticism and bodily excess.

Hellenistic sculpture manifests a revolution in Greek aesthetics. In the late 4th century BCE, with the emergence of royal patronage, we see radical shifts in art theory and in the artworks themselves. The aesthetic newness of Hellenistic sculpture lies in the choice of themes and represented moments, the modes of contextual display, as well as in the treatment of sculptural three-dimensionality and surface sensualism; its cultural 'modernity' lies in its almost boundless geographic scope. Based on a series of case studies, the seminar will discuss the socio-political implications of Hellenistic sculpture, as well as central hermeneutic issues at stake, such as concepts of involved spectatorship, lifelikeness, style and meaning, space and nature, theatricality, emotion in the arts, notions of otherness (barbarians, peasants, and cripples) and the divine.

In second-century Rome, Greek Myths enter a new sphere: tombs. But the mythological narratives adorning the imperial relief sarcophagi are more than traditional tales being retold. Their original visual language, combining Greek and Roman motifs, turns the caskets into powerful mediators that help express central experiences of life and death. In this seminar we will examine the complex imagery of Roman sarcophagi and interpret the mythological narratives from different perspectives – contextual, cultural, social, and philosophical.

Concentrates on art and architecture created for the court of Constantinople from the 9th to the 12th century. Focuses on objects and monuments, exploring their role in political, religious, and personal events.

Courtly culture and patronage in Paris, Prague, and Burgundy, with an emphasis on issues of artistic exchange, dynastic commemoration, princely piety, the development of secular genres, and the emergence of the court artist.

The bible provided the underpinning of most medieval art. Images, however, involved more than translating texts into visual form. Focusing on England, France and Germany in the High Middle Ages, the course will compare narrative cycles in wall painting, manuscript illumination, sculpture and stained glass against the foil of oral storytelling and bible commentary.

Taught from the collection of Books of Hours in the Houghton Library, the course will teach students how to describe and study medieval manuscripts and introduce various aspects of these richly illuminated prayer books. Special attention to the texts and images in the context of later medieval painting and piety within longer traditions of picturing prayer extending back deep into the Middle Ages.

Focuses on the phenomenon of relic worship and the popular veneration of holy sites and holy men in the early Christian period. A number of sites that for differing reasons became important cult centers around the Mediterranean world are studied.

German monumental sculpture from the 11th through 13th centuries in its broader European context using the cast collection in Adolphus Busch Hall.

An architectural history of Rome from the empire through the early Christian and medieval city, the Renaissance revival of antiquity, Baroque planning, and early archeology to Fascism and modernism, including the imperial fora, aqueducts, fountains, medieval basilicas, the piazza, villas, gardens, St. Peter's and the Vatican complex.

Genial architecture, gardens, and urban planning from 1600 to 1750 in Rome (Maderno, Borromini, Bernini, Cortona, Piranesi), Naples (Fanzago), Sicily, Turin (Guarini), Venice (Longhena), Paris and Versailles (Le Vau, Le Notre, Francois & Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Perrault), London (Jones, Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh), Vienna (Fischer von Erlach), Prague (Santini Aichel), Madrid, Salamanca, Lisbon, Mafra, Goa, Vilnius, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg. Issues to be treated include urban planning, landscape, water and fountains, earthquake reconstruction, the influence of mathematics and the sciences, architectural drawing and the illustrated architectural book.

Colloquium aimed at undergraduates on the Vatican palace including the Fran Angelico's chapel for Nicholas V, the Raphael stanze, the Loggia of Raphael, the Sistine Chapel including the Michelangelo frescoes and the Raphael tapestries, the Cortile del Belvedere, Julius II's statue court and collections, the Tower of the Winds and Gallery of Maps, the Vatican Library, the Vatican Museums, as well as an overview of old and new St. Peters under Bramante, Michelangelo, Maderno and Bernini

What was modern art? To find out, we examine the aesthetic and social underpinnings of twelve defining episodes in the history of modernism, beginning with the radical reinvention of painting led by the French artist Edouard Manet in the 1860s, and concluding with the photographic practices and object-sculpture of the Paris-based American surrealist Man Ray in the 1930s. Though Paris is the art world's cosmopolitan center through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, we analyze also key modernist developments in Italy, Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands. Particular attention to pictorial invention, embrace of new media, and the refashioning of artistic identity.

This course is an introduction to designed landscapes, and landscape architecture since 1850. Thematic lectures will focus on the history and theory of designed landscapes in the Western world. They will also address landscape creations of the Eastern civilizations and of other time periods as they become relevant for the topics and objects discussed in this class. Students will be able to develop critical and formal analytical skills that facilitate the reading and interpretation of designed landscapes as both physical spaces and as cultural media that sit at the nexus between art and science.

This course will examine the role of printmaking, principally during the 18th and 19th centuries. Attention will be given to prints as an independent medium for artists (the production of what is commonly called "original prints"). But we will also be attentive to the role of "reproductive prints" as a mode of communication. In particular, the 18th century developing taste for drawings as collectibles gave rise to technical innovations in order to transmit the distinctive characteristics of drawings. The invention of lithography at the end of the century, and the development of a new kind of wood engraving, made possible an explosion of image production and creation of the illustrated press. Finally, the invention of photography in the central years of the 19th century caused what can be described as, a visual revolution, which deeply affected art and its reception.

This course explores Vienna in its golden age (1890-1938) through attempts by its leading lights-including Klimt, Schiele, Freud, Wittgenstein and Schonberg-to imagine a new architecture of home. At once a built environment and a subjective inwardness, the Viennese interior was a blueprint of dwelling and of exile for our modern world.

Explores the emergence of artistic individuality in French 18th-century art and culture. What was modern about the 18th-century artist? What were the criteria of artistic self-definition? Among the issues addressed: the cultural myth of the artist; artist vs. critic; artistic identity and the philosophical notions of the self; subjectivity, sexuality, and gender; the artist's touch; authorship; melancholia; eccentricity; the artist's body; fashion. Artists include: Watteau, Chardin, Fragonard, Vigee-Lebrun, David, Girodet. Museum trip(s).

This course will examine artistic production in the US and Europe between 1945 and 1975 to clarify some of the most crucial questions of this thirty year period: How did post war visual culture repress or acknowledge the recent 'caesura of civilization' brought about by World War II?; how did the neo-avantgarde position itself with regard to the legacies of the avantgardes of the 1920s?; how did artistic production situate itself in relation to the newly emerging apparatus of Mass Media culture?

An introduction to fundamental properties and behaviors of buildings and structures through a combination of lectures, workshops, and design-build assignments.

The course revolves around close looking at twelve Chinese artworks from Harvard Art Museums. The objects to be examined range from the Neolithic period to the twentieth century. They anchor larger horizons, opening up hidden historical dimensions. Students learn to interrogate artworks by forming fruitful questions and identifying leads that take them to deeper cultural historical contexts. It will be demonstrated that artworks yield insights into a culture in a palpable way unobtainable from texts.

Understood as a divine abode in Indic mythology and envisioned as the immortal realm of "Shangri-la" by later western interpreters, the Himalayas abound with Hindu and Buddhist holy sites. This course explores the vibrant visual culture of the Himalayan region. Two learning goals are: 1) Understanding the historical development of distinctive artistic forms in paintings and sculptures of Nepal and Tibet during major moments of artistic innovations in the region, including the artistic responses to the current political situation; 2) Locating this knowledge in the context of the history of reception and collecting of Himalayan art in the west.

The course explores the history of Indian painting based on the collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We will investigate the theory of pictorial form in India and its relationship to the society at large against the historical currents by probing the development and changes in artistic styles and material culture of painting production. We will pay particular attention to the role of media, such as palm-leaf, birch bark, paper, and pigments, along with consideration of changing symbolic and material meanings of color. Regular visits (sections) to the museums and conservations labs to examine the paintings in person are to be scheduled throughout the semester.

The course explores a central paradox. Meditative visualization, a key aspect of Buddhist practice, involves introspection. It does not require looking at pictures. Why, then, were pictures nevertheless made to externalize interiority in medieval China? The course looks at murals in Buddhist caves, relief sculptures on stupa-towers, woodblock prints uncovered from hidden crypts, and other artifacts related to meditative visualization. Readings include some key Buddhist sutras. Among the core issues driving the course is the current debate about the modeling of mind and intelligence and narratives of "consciousness."

This seminar will critically examine the depiction and contextualization of individuals of African descent in European and American art. Among the various issues raised are historic changes in the idea of and construction of race, the impact of early internationalism, notions of difference in the age of exploration, slavery and notions of selfhood, and representation as part of the larger colonial project.

We study the few remaining Mesoamerican Pre-Columbian, as well as the much more numerous sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonial, pictorial manuscripts. We also study the only three pictorial manuscripts of the Andes. Emphasis is on the production, form and iconography of the different manuscripts. The physical and formal properties also are examined in relation to use of manuscripts in the Americas, both before and after the Spanish conquest.

This seminar addresses questions of cultural display through the art and architecture of world fairs, mid-nineteenth century to present. Students are introduced to the seminal fair events beginning with the Crystal Palace in London, and extending to fairs in the U.S., France, Belgium, Spain, Japan and China. the history of fairs as artistic and social phenomenon is explored along with how these events shaped national identity, ethnicity, social class, race, imperialism, colonialism, and gender.

This course concentrates on the art and architecture of the two ancient American civilizations, surveying the forms of representation used to establish imperial presence within the accepted vernacular of Mesoamerican and Andean artistic traditions. Special attention is given to the role of art as a means of expressing imperial claims to mythic and historic precedents, upon which political and economic expansion could be realized.

Architecture of the eastern Mediterranean basin (at Italian, Ottoman, and Mamluk courts) with emphasis on cross-cultural encounters and transmission of the Romano-Byzantine heritage, science and technology, architectural practice, ornament, urban design, military, religious and domestic architecture.

A critical examination of controversial concepts that have shaped the Islamic field since its 19th-century construction to the present. Topics include orientalism, late antiquity and the Islamic city, archaeology and museums, ornamentality and abstraction, the arabesque and calligraphy, non-perspectival visuality, collectors and exhibitions

Texts of the Persian literary tradition that were illustrated constitute our focus, including Firdawsi's Shahnama and Nizami's Khamsa. Study of word and image is staged through key examples to open new lines of inquiry.

The course will focus on domestic life and environment in everyday Byzantine society. Course topics will examine the private as well as public life of the individual from childhood to adult life, through artifacts from the household, as well as education, work, and other social contexts.

The course will concentrate on manuscripts produced after the period of Iconoclasm beginning in the second half of the 9th century. A variety of texts will be examined from courtly as well as monastic environments.

A wide-ranging introduction to critical approaches to the study of medieval art, with emphasis on systems of signification, mixing historiography and methodology in a workshop format in which students help set the agenda.

Examines Giorgio Vasari's oeuvre as critic, historian, artist and architect as it illuminates conceptions of style, progress, aesthetic quality, artistic personality and exchanges between the arts in Renaissance Italy.

Since its beginnings, the history of art has been conceived of as a teleological process defined largely in terms of progress, culminating in the triumph of modernism. As a counter-heuristic, we will teach the history of art from the present and looking back to the past. After an historiographical introduction, focused on Vasari, Winckelmann, Hegel and historicism, also in reverse, each section will consist of a critical chain of appropriations made by modern artists who constructed their own understanding of tradition, ending in Antiquity. Each section will focus on a major artist.

This seminar will take up questions of patronage, pedagogical practice and cultural memory to assess the extraordinary collection of natural specimens, scientific instruments and works of art that Harvard College amassed in the late eighteenth century.

The architectural book and its readers, authors, circulation and manufacture in the early modern period.

Issues include: art and the public sphere; the birth of the critic; high & low; interiors and interiority; intimacy; artistic identity; sexuality, sexual difference, and gender; the discourse of race. Emphasis on new research and methodologies.

Explores painting as the privileged medium and institution of artistic modernity (from the late 17th c to the present). Issues: Color; Liveliness; Truth; Autonomy; Subjectivity; Touch; Blindness; the Ready-Made; the Post-Medium Condition.

Tracing visual culture from Germany's imperial provincialism to the avantgarde practices from 1919 - 1937, from the Expressionism debates, to the critiques of DADA artists and Marxist theoreticians, from photomontage to the photography of New Objectivity, from the BAUHAUS' projects of collectivized production to painting's return to order, signaling Fascism's destruction of avantgarde culture in 1937.

Emergence, development, reception, and legacy of Cubism in Paris between 1907 and 1937, focusing on Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Gris, the four major artists of the pioneering Galerie Kahnweiler. Having analyzed the fundamental role of primitivism, tradition, mass culture, and the commodity form in Cubism's genesis, our major endeavor is to unpack its ever-shifting relation to its aesthetic Others, namely, abstraction, decoration, the ready-made, realism, and monumentalism. Crucial to this endeavor is a thorough examination of the problem of medium in Cubism, considering not only drawing, easel painting, collage, and constructed sculpture, but also mural painting, architecture, photography, and film.

Addresses the work of key figures of post-war European art, under the perspective of different, yet complementary conflicts: avantgarde and neo-avantgarde, artistic practices and spectacle culture, aesthetics of repression, trauma and commemoration.

This term: Great Britain, Scandinavia , Austria, and the Benelux countries. Addresses the artistic responses to the legacies of Surrealism, to American mass culture, and to the impact of Fascist domination.

A central preoccupation of later aesthetic theory and the history of art has been the precise nature of the relationship between the work of art and everyday life. This seminar focuses on the initial embrace of, and later assault on, orthodox modernism's faith of art as an autonomous institution by the constellation of movements known collectively as the Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes

Investigates the conundrum of "thingness" in art history, introducing theoretical frameworks for interpreting everything from teapots to minimal sculpture. Interrogates forms of exchange - economic, libidinal, aesthetic, historical- that objects invite (or refuse).

The seminar addresses the changing aesthetic theories that emerged during the Weimar Republic and its aftermath in exile, in the work of some of the key philosophers and art historians, from Georg Lukacs, to Siegfried Kracauer, from Carl Einstein to T.W. Adorno and Aby Warburg.

This course will treat questions of trickery, deceit, and duplicity as characteristics of art, and attempt to theorize the aesthetics of deception. The approach will be through contemporary art, where artists have reinvented the old association between art and illusion, but students of any period or culture will be able to pursue their interests as the class treats the long history, and complicated theory, of art's association with trickery.

Graduate seminar exploring the intersection of the field of art history with the globalized art world. What is "contemporary art" - in theory, in practice, and in history?

Explores the invention of drawing as a modern medium. Examines practices, theories, and debates on drawing focusing especially in the 18th &19th centuries. Hands-on experience of works of art, honing of curatorial skills with practice in exhibition design, and extensive discussions of recent readings and methodologies. Materiality, technique, the aesthetic, philosophical, and institutional parameters of practice, including the notions of trace, touch, stain, speed, surface, sight, time, reproduction, generation, the mechanical, value, curiosity, etc. Course designed as preparation for a curricular exhibition on the subject to take place at Harvard Art Museums involving students

Utilizes a critical consideration of William Kentridge's work for the purpose of imagining new paradigms for writing about art. Explores Kentridge's range and understanding of media, his primary sources (visual, musical, and literary), his links to European modernism and Renaissance traditions, and his self-presentation in performances, lectures, and writings.

Seminar explores the "voice" in Chinese paintings from the eleventh- through eighteenth centuries. The goal is to 1) test the validity of transposing "lyrical voice" to the study of painting and 2) formulate a methodology of historicizing pictorial rhetoric by considering both textual cues and material medium while favoring neither.

The seminar explores the idea of playing by the "book" in design. The "book" is a set of rules embedded in classical Chinese texts. It will be demonstrated that the principle extrapolated from the "book" informs various designs in traditional China. The instructor and students work together to identify new leads in the core readings and visual materials, devise and revise the master plan and narratives, and push the central storyline to new horizons.

The course explores the mechanism of early Chinese design and visual programming. Early visual and textual blueprints and the First Emperor's tomb serve as starting point. A variety of designs-bronze decorations and tomb furnishings-from Shang through Han will be examined in this framework. Bio-technology is the central concern.

This seminar explores the art of Indian Esoteric Buddhism from various interpretive vantage points. After a brief survey of the earliest phase of its development, the discussion will focus on unpacking the recent scholarly discourses on Esoteric or Tantric Buddhism in relation to the artistic productions in medieval South Asia (ca. 800-1200CE). The two main topics for the semester will be the Saiva-Buddhist interactions as manifested in iconographic (and artistic) articulations, and the validity of semiotic and historical interpretations of iconography and ritual of Indian Esoteric Buddhism.

The course scrutinizes cases of early and medieval Chinese art. The issues that drive the course include programmatic thinking behind artworks, the temporal-spatial configurations, etc. Isolated artworks are treated as bases to reconstruct larger programs. The course draws on objects in American museums (e.g., sarcophagi, epitaph tablets, shrines) wherever applicable

Explores relic-inspired medieval Chinese visual programs from the seventh to tenth century. The scope encompasses Japan and Korea wherever applicable. Key issues include the making of algorithm behind the artistic programming derived from relic lore and the elaborate regimens that enable the "body" to evolve into new states of being.

The main mode of production in Indian temple architecture is often explained through a strict diagram or vastupurusamandala, an idea extracted from Sanskrit artistic treaties (silpasastra or vastusastra) of varying dates. Going beyond this essentialist tendency, the seminar will explore design strategies adopted to create the most powerful sacred space for each religious and political community and examine the historical relationship between the circulation of such architectural (and artistic) knowledge and the production and use of an actual temple (and other sacred objects). Focus will be on the development of regionalism in temple architecture during the millennium before 1500CE. Note: Most Sanskrit texts are available in English translation.

This seminar examines art in Japan from the mid nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the visual arts, performance art, commercial design, and new media. Topics to be addressed include the reception of European beaux-arts institutions and artistic practices, international expositions, the role of art in the formation of the nation-state, the rise of the avant-garde, art and mass culture, and Japanese exhibition culture.

This graduate seminar explores the world of Japanese painting circa 1600 through Tohaku on Painting, the earliest text to record the words of a Japanese painter. Wherever possible surviving works will be discussed in relation to the text's 93 entries. Themes to be explored include the life and work of Hasegawa Tohaku, the culture of tea display, the reception of Chinese painting in Japan, the Ashikaga shogunal collection, East Asian artistic legend, mounting and viewing practice, the legacy of medieval Zen monk-painters, and the competition among professional painting houses in the early modern era.

This seminar explores the work of the Japanese artist Tawaraya Sotatsu (active ca. 1600-1640). Emphasis will be placed on an intermedia approach that examines his paintings vis-as-vis other kinds of artistic surfaces.

Topics to be determined in consideration of interests of students.

Individual work in preparation for the General Examination for the PhD degree or, by arrangement, on special topics not included in the announced course offerings.

A series of team-taught workshops designed to sharpen skills in the observation, analysis, and historical interpretation of works of art and architecture.